Abstract

Neo-liberalism is not Adam Smith; neo-liberalism is not market society, neo-liberalism is not the Gulag on the insidious scale of capitalism...The problem of neoliberalism is rather how the overall exercise of political power can be modeled on the principles of a market economy...[I]n order to carry out this operation...the neoliberals had to subject classical liberalism to a number of transformations. The first of these...was basically dissociating the market economy from the political principle of laissez-faire.Michel Foucault (2008, p.131)